Jo Reed

Author of ...

Virtual Stormy Weather

By joreed, Oct 16 2012 6:45PM

Last week I finally managed to crawl out of the wreckage of a hacked website and assess the damage. It wasn't pretty. In real life, I spend some of my time sailing yachts (other people's, sadly, not my own), and I could see at a glance that had my website been a 50 foot Bavaria, there would be a big hole in the hull, a snapped keel and six feet of water above deck. There wasn't going to be an awful lot to salvage. The structure and content weren't so much of a problem. The old site was in need of a bit of antifouling anyway. There were quite a few barnacles clinging to the underside - glitches, errors and dead links that needed scraping off. I was quite philosophical about that. What got to me, though, was the psychological effectt. My little beacon of existence in cyber space had been snuffed out. I no longer existed as far as the world wide web community was concerned. Other friends whose sites have, at one time or another, suffered the same fate, agreed that this was by far the most distressing legacy of the hacker. Once upon a time, our personal relationships, our business dealings, from household shopping to buying insurance, were done with and by people we actually knew. We introduced ourselves by shaking hands and saying 'Hi' to someone standing in front of us. The Internet, at the beginning, was little more than a geek's bulletin board. Before that, of course, there were telephones and, in dire circumstances, paper, envelopes and stamps. Now it is the 21st century, and without a web presence, it is difficult not to think of oneself as invisible, cut off from the world, non-existent on some fundamental level - like someone not invited to a party, peering through a steamy window at the revellers inside. I'm pretty sure that, in some ways, isn't a good thing. But it hasn't stopped me from wriggling into my posh frock, breaking out the lippy and getting myself reinstated as a party animal. I can't help the feeling of relief at once more having a door to open, even if there's nobody out there to let in!